Well, at least they’re not hiding it any more. Lest anyone doubt where the New Zealand media’s ideological sympathies really lie, Newshub has published a gushing paean to perhaps the most destructive ideologue in history: Karl Marx.
This should hardly be surprising: the New Zealand legacy is bought-and-paid-for by a government run by a former world socialist leader. But Jacinda Ardern didn’t have to buy the Marxist sympathies of the legacy media: they’d already sold their souls to the ideology which murdered more than 100 million people in the past century — and is still blighting the world with its idiotic, vicious nostrums.
Political movements representing masses of new industrial workers, many inspired by his thought, reshaped the world in the 19th and 20th centuries through revolution and reform. His work influenced unions, labour parties and social democratic parties, and helped spark revolution via communist parties in Europe and beyond.
And we all know how it turned out: from the gulags of the Soviet Union, to history’s worse mass-murder in Maoist China, communism has only ever brought suffering in its wake. Oh, but they argue, that wasn’t “real communism”. What “real communism” is, no-one can ever say, because, conveniently, Marx and Engels never laid out a detailed political plan: communism, they argued, would just happen.
And if it didn’t “just happen”, then it wasn’t the theory, it was the people. Just kill a few million more and paradise will arrive.
The greatest horror of all this is that Marx was so demonstrably wrong, about nearly everything, that it’s astounding — almost criminal — that anyone still takes his nonsense seriously.
Imagine an aeroplane that crashed, every time, killing all its passengers, no matter who was flying it. Any airline that continued to fly it would be regarded as not just stupid, but actually criminally evil.
That, in a nutshell, is the persistent defenders of Marx.
On economics alone, he made important observations that influenced our understanding of the role of boom/bust cycles, the link between market competition and rapid technological advances, and the tendency of markets towards concentration and monopolies […]
This would inevitably lead to militant international political organisation in response.
It should have been the first clue that Marx was cluelessly wrong: the revolutions that he and Engels spent the rest of their lives predicting would break out at any moment in Europe, never did.
This is the most obvious clue as to just how limited Marx’s thinking really was. Instead of a prescient sage of the ages, he was blinkered and parochial, fatally limited by his inability to see past the transient conditions of his own time and place.
Consider Marx’s “labour theory of value”. Wrong. “Increasing misery of the proletariat”. Wrong. In fact, Marx’s economic theories have been so thoroughly debunked that even most Marxists stopped taking them seriously.
When revolution did happen, it happened mostly by accident, in the one place in Europe Marx never gave much heed to. In fact, the Russian revolution debunked even Marx’s theories: Russia was a feudal society. According to Marx’s “laws” of history and economics, Russia had to undergo a thorough capitalist do-over before revolution could happen. That it didn’t, seriously worried the Bolsheviks themselves.
But when reality disproves the theory, Marxists never abandon the theory. Instead, like millenarian cultists faced with the obvious fact that the world didn’t end when they predicted, they just rejig the theory.
The Bolsheviks were forced to do so when their revolution happened in spite of Marx. When even the Russian revolution and its attempts to apply Marxian economics failed, Marxists systematically covered their arses, beginning with Gramsci, and continuing to the ludicrous contemporary ideologies of Queer Theory and Gender Theory.
Marx had always aspired to be a philosopher, but was unable to pursue it as a profession because his views were judged too radical for a university post in his native Prussia. Instead, he earned his living as a crusading journalist.
The reality was that he was a mediocre philosopher at best, and not much chop as a journalist. He couldn’t even make a living at that: instead, he spent his entire life mooching off everyone he could squeeze a penny out of, from his mother to his trustafarian sidekick, Engels.
Indeed, Marx was such a shameless parasite that he sponged what should have been a respectable, lower-middle-class living. Yet, as his mother lamented, while Marx pretended to understand capital enough to write books about it, he was completely unable to manage capital in real life. Instead of paying his household bills, he splurged other peoples’ money on trying to ape the bourgeois lifestyle that he so derided, with riding and elocution lessons for his daughters, seaside holidays, and so on.
His influence was so far reaching that people are often unaware just how much his ideas have shaped their own thinking.
The truth is more that Marxists have thoroughly white-anted nearly every institution of liberal democracy — a deliberate strategy formulated by Marxists in the 1960s, which they called the “Long March through the Institutions” in a salute to the founding mythology of the Maoists. Their influence is so pervasive that their brainwashed minions are not even aware that they’ve been brainwashed.
By any account, Marx was a giant of modern thought.
Newshub
Which is like saying that Hitler was a giant of modern history.
But at least no-one defends Hitler by arguing, “But that wasn’t real Nazism — real Nazism just hasn’t been tried yet!”
